Challenges exist within the area of license reconciliation. By way of example, consider the following common scenario. At the beginning of a billing cycle, a number of licenses are purchased. During the billing cycle, a number of products (such as software products) are installed and used. Subsequently, at the end of the billing cycle, a license reconciliation calculation is carried out to determine the entitlement of the licenses to the products and examine whether the current usage of the software products are fully entitled by the purchased licenses.
However, reconciliation logic used in existing approaches incurs heavy manual efforts and can present accuracy challenges. For instance, existing approaches include applying usable licenses to deployed software installations without optimizing the mix of license types and licenses within a type. This can lead to inaccurate reconciliation, which in turn causes false negatives and potentially increases licensing costs. On the other hand, in existing approaches that explore all possible license combinations, the reconciliation time will be prohibitively high.
Accordingly, a need exists to enable selection from multiple applicable licenses, considering license types and restrictions.